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People /Marina Abramović

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The world-famous Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović is an icon of recent art history. Since the beginning of her artistic trajectory in Belgrade in the 1970s, she has become a pioneer in performance art - a genre in which she played a decisive role from the earliest stages of its development. By exploring her physical and mental boundaries, she endured pain, exhaustion and danger, looking for emotional and spiritual transformation. Between 1976 and 1988 she worked as a duo with the German artist and her former lover Ulay. Mental and physical endurance were also central tools in their joint work. Marina Abramović received the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1997 for her performance Balkan Baroque. A recent highlight in her career is the 700 hour performance The Artist is Present (2010) at the MoMA in New York, that allowed visitors to sit opposite her as long as they wished and make eye contact. This intense performance was part of a large retrospective of her work. Marina Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI) - a platform for immaterial work that runs over long periods of time and a vehicle for creating new possibilities for collaboration between artists and thinkers of different backgrounds. Her most recent publication was released in 2016 - the autobiography Walk Through Walls: A Memoir (Crown Archetype, New York). A new retrospective, The Cleaner, took place in February 2017 at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and moves to Copenhagen, Oslo, Bonn and at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. Pelléas et Mélisande is Marina Abramović’s second collaboration as a scenographer with choreographers and directors Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet, with whom she created a new choreography to Maurice Ravel’s Boléro in 2013 with the Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris.